Gisella Perl

She was called the “Angel of Auschwitz” for her medical work during World War Two. Her story is one of determination to do the right thing, courage and selflessness during the worst time in human history. The film “Out of the Ashes” very powerfully tells her life story.

She was Gisella Perl.

Gisella was born on 10th December, 1907, into a Jewish family. She grew up in Maramarossziget, which was then a part of Hungary. At 16 years of age, Gisella graduated from secondary school, coming first in her class and the only Jew doing so. This encouraged Gisella to want to study medicine but her father, Maurice, forbade her at first fearing that his daughter would forget her Jewish roots. However, she proved that her father’s fears were unfounded.

Maurice relented eventually and allowed his daughter to study medicine. Gisella became a successful and well known gynecologist in Sighetu Marmatiei. Getting married to Dr Ephraim Kraws, the couple had two children and continued to practice medicine right up until 1944.

In 1944, Nazi Germany invaded Hungary and Gisella, with her whole family, (mother, father, husband, son and extended family), were deported to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp.

At the camp, Gisella and her family were split up and she never saw any one of them again. (Her daughter was ‘hidden’ with a non-Jewish family, and mother and daughter were reunited many years later).

In the camp, all of the female doctors had to identify themselves. Gisella recognized the Nazi doctor who was giving the orders and he recognized her. He was Dr Victor Kapezius and with a frozen smile, he told Gisella: “You are going to be the camp gynecologist. Don’t worry about instruments — you won’t have any. Your medical kit belongs to me now”.

Gisella was ordered to ‘create’ a hospital in the Auschwitz Group C. Thankfully, she was not alone with four other doctors and four nurses being ordered to do the same, The ‘hospital’ was designated for the female slave labourers. There was no medicine, occasional paper bandages and only one knife to use for ‘operations’, which Gisella had to sharpen with a stone. The Nazis demanded that the ‘hospital’ be kept meticulously clean with threats of beatings and even death. With no cleaning provisions of any kind and very little water, Gisella and the others had to clean the floor with their hands.

During the day, Gisella and the other doctors were kept busy with setting broken bones of prisoners who had been beaten by the Nazi guards, and operating on the deep lacerations which had been made by the Nazis whips and which had become infected. Treating prisoners who had typhus and pneumonia was an everyday and all day occurrence.

Gisella was ‘assigned’ to care for 32,000 women who were kept just for slave labour in the camp. Six months later, she witnessed the “liquidation” of these women to make way for a new batch of slave labour. The months during which these women were kept alive were unbearably miserable.

Gisella herself tells us: “Those first weeks at Auschwitz were made unbearably miserable by the various skin eruptions caused by the weather, exposure, deficient food, and lack of water for drinking and washing”.

During her time in the camp, Gisella saw the most horrifying things that the Nazis did to the women and their young children. The ‘lie’ the Nazis would tell the pregnant women was that they would be taken to another camp where there was more food, milk and better conditions. So the women would willingly climb up into the trucks believing this ‘lie’. In fact, the Nazis took these hopeful mothers to their deaths. It is well documented what happened but because it is so horrific, I just can not write it down. When I first read this, tears just fell down my face because it is ‘unbelievable’ that humans can do such terrible things to pregnant women and children. What I will say is that these women ended up in the crematory — and not all of them were dead!

When Gisella found out about this, she was determined to make sure that there was not another pregnant woman in the Auschwitz Concentration camp.

This was difficult because, although the men and women were separated, the women’s camp was ruled by male Nazi guards who would often rape the women, or some of the women would trade sex for what little there was, and some would come into the camp pregnant. This seemed an impossible situation to deal with but, as always with the human spirit, a ‘way’ was found.

When Gisella found out that a fellow prisoner was pregnant, she explained what the Nazis would do if the guards found out and what she could do as a doctor to help the woman. Knowing that both mother and unborn child would be killed, a ‘way’ of helping was to abort the fetus but keep the mother alive. Gisella always believed that one day some of these mothers would be free to have more children, in a safer world, which thankfully came true.

So in the middle of the night, Gisella ‘helped’ these women with her bare hands. This was a great risk to her life because if she had been caught, Gisella would have been shot. Gisella herself wrote: “It was up to me to save the life of the mothers, if there was no other way, than by destroying the life of the unborn children”.

Gisella was also forced to work with Dr Josef Mengele who experimented on the prisoners. He was a cruel and nasty doctor, and showed no regard whatsoever for the lives of these women or any children they had.

Gisella was transferred to the Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp. “Bergen Belsen can never be described because every language lacks the suitable words to depict its horrors — There were no crematories to burn the bodies”, she tells us. Again, Gisella was put in charge of the ‘hospital’ and carried on her ‘work’ here to help the women.

When the troops liberated these camps in 1945, Gisella searched for her family only to find that she was the only one who survived, (except for her daughter as mentioned earlier).

Just how did Gisella rebuild her life after such a terrible ordeal?

Gisella moved to the United States and ‘told her story’. Eleanor Roosevelt encouraged her to return to practicing medicine, which Gisella did, eventually opening her own practice. Each time Gisella attended a delivery, she paused to utter a prayer: “God, you owe me a life, a living baby”.

Over the course of the next 43 years, this “Angel” delivered roughly 3,000 healthy (and free) babies.

In 1979, Gisella was reunited with her daughter, living out the rest of her life in Herzliya, Israel. Gisella never let go of her Jewish roots.

Gisella Perl died on 16th December, 1988, at 81 years of age.

After the war, this brave woman gave testimony in the courts, telling the world what the Nazis doctors did in the camps, as she faced them in a Court of Law. She also wrote about her experiences in the book “I Was A Doctor In Auschwitz”.

What would you and I have done? The only thing I can answer is that I personally draw great inspiration from Gisella’s very real and true story.